


Wish you were here

by Tyellas



Series: Lab T-4 [17]
Category: The Shape of Water (2017)
Genre: Angst, Decisions, F/M, Fairy Tale Elements, Fluff, Friendship, Healing, Lovecraftian, Nuclear war mention, Original Character(s), Pie, Post-Movie, Romance, Sad and Happy, Sexual Content, Spoilers, True Love, soft focus lovemaking, supposed to be a genfic but what can I say
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-10
Updated: 2018-02-10
Packaged: 2019-03-16 05:22:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,631
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13629486
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tyellas/pseuds/Tyellas
Summary: Every place in the Sunshine State is a tourist place. A traveling pair pause in one of those places for a day. For some errands, some food, some directions, and their own next step together.





	Wish you were here

**Author's Note:**

> This story follows on from [Primordial Language](http://archiveofourown.org/works/13476387), which is rated Explicit, compared to this one, which is rated Mature.

Every place in Florida is a tourist place.

This beachside village isn’t that special. There’s a swoop of wetlands at its northern end. Because of that, the seaside is untidy, bark and leaves and clumsy shells cluttering the tide mark on the beach. That’s kept the motel developers away. There still seem to be enough visitors to warrant signs for fishing tours, for saltwater taffy, and, outside this shabby lunch counter, for FRESH KEY LIME.

At least, that’s Elisa’s guess.

Tucked into a booth at the lunch counter, Elisa is slowly, methodically eating a piece of pie. Amazing, that _this_ is key lime pie. She dares to lift her sunglasses to peek at her plate a third time. The pie is a soft, creamy yellow, with only the slightest flecks of green from lime zest. Puffs of fresh cream lighten its tart richness. The gently crumbling graham crust gives it just enough substance. It’s the best pie she’s ever had in her life.

Elisa looks outside, at the clear afternoon sun. There’s no ocean view on this side street, but there is a pay phone. She turns away. She was always terrible about learning phone numbers – who was a mute going to call?

The counter lady comes over. “Let me top up your hot water for that tea, hon. Your throat feeling better?”

Elisa looks up through the sunglasses. She touches the silk scarf around her throat and smiles, nods. Today, visiting this one time, she can be the lady-with-the-sore-throat.

The lady clicks her tongue. “Get back to where you’re staying and put on more’n a bathing suit and a scarf. I know it seems warm here to you Northerners! But it gets nippy at night, now. Even if you want that James Bond look!” Elisa tilts her head, confused. Before she can figure out how to ask, the door’s bell jangles. The lady goes to deal with another customer.

Letting another luscious bite melt on her tongue, Elisa reads the paper place mat. It’s a map of Florida, the Sunshine State. Elisa traces from the star of St. Augustine, just up the coast, frowning as her finger taps Miami, then further down to the bottom, to Key West.  A way to go yet, and it was only the beginning.

Elisa gives another mouthful her full attention, then stacks a few purchases beside her. She takes up a postcard and a pencil. She ached to send one to Zelda, but she didn’t know Zelda’s exact address. You knew somebody for years and you didn’t find that out.

She’d been finding out plenty about herself these past few weeks. That she’d swim naked and love it. That she’d steal from a closed-up beach house, the white bathing suit and a scarf and more, to do what she was doing today. That she’d be braver, and more terrified, than she’d ever thought. That she’d eat fish without cooking it first – and it would taste all right!

Elisa caresses the bottom of the place mat’s map with a secret smile. It’s all such an adventure, a dream come true. The past few weeks with the creature have shown her how right she was to want to save him, how good her friends were to help her. For all the imperfections of the Eastern seaboard's water, he is flourishing. He guards her and guides her, strong and ardent, more loving than ever. She does her best to keep up and help. Perhaps half the time, she manages that. She is still dazzled that he wants her by his side, this prince of the water. Except, as in any fairy tale, there is a price to pay. Today’s the day for it.

This brings her back to her postcard. She begins to write:

_Dear Giles,_

_You are right about real key lime pie. It’s delicious.  I hope this candy is, too. Please share it with Zelda if you are in touch._

_It’s beautiful down here. It's good for our health. We swim all the time. He’s taught me how._

_To you and Zelda, please know that I –_

Elisa pauses, curling a hand around the pencil, like she’s a child again. She’s almost out of space, already. What to say? Will he be getting this in prison? Will he get it at all?

_I’m so sorry_

_I didn’t mean to go but I’m so happy now_

_I don’t want to get you in any more trouble_

_I want to know you’re OK_

_I'm going to_

_I can’t_

_I love_

Elisa presses her lips together, exhales. Finally, she settles on:

_wish you were here._

She doesn’t add her sharp little signature. Instead, she fills in the bottom with hearts and Xs and Os.

Elisa turns over the postcard. She had almost picked one with a key lime pie recipe. But half the postcard rack had been about the favorite legend for this part of Florida, and she’d liked the story. So, on the front, her postcard says: _After visiting the Fountain of Youth this is how I feel!_ It features a drawing of a dancing, rejuvenated couple.

She puts it beside her other purchase, a box of that saltwater taffy. Slyly, she glances at the counter. The lady is busy selling someone a whole pie. Elisa opens the box and takes one of the wrapped items out. She untwists it and smiles at her own cleverness. Gold gleams, salvage from a shipwreck, picked up on the way here. Inside the box, she’s replaced most of the taffy disks with pairs of coins, except for the mint molasses ones. That’s Giles’s favorite flavor. Elisa hears the shop’s screen door jingle as the other customer left. Hastily, she twists the wax paper closed, replaces it.

Elisa is tying the ribbon back around the box when the lady comes back over. “I saw you reading there. Sorry we don’t got the view. How about some papers?” Elisa smiles yet again and mouths _thank you_ , as if her silence is temporary.She unfolds a newspaper, her first one in days, weeks, with worried interest. Will there be anything in it about events in Baltimore?

There isn’t, and she sees why. There’s bigger news. CUBAN CRISIS. RUSSIA WARNS OF NUCLEAR WAR AS FIRST TEST OF BLOCKADE NEARS. Elisa flashes back to the fallout shelter signs on every other wall in Occam. In the break room, the workers had always joked about Occam being one of the bomb targets, about working at Ground Zero. She thinks about what that means for all of Baltimore, in a war like that. Her breath catches in her throat.

She’ll send the box anyway.

The news is awful, but it comes with something else she needs: another map on the front page. The war crisis is centered around Cuba. So this map shows the whole Caribbean, from Florida to the middle of South America. Elisa scrutinizes it carefully, doing her utmost to memorize the islands, north and south. She notes where Cuba, another Ground Zero, is. There’s an arc of islands in the east that leads down to the coast of South America.

Elisa finishes her tea, savoring the last bittersweet mouthful. She pays and leaves. It’s a lot easier being mute when she can leave large tips. She hopes it’s the counter lady who, after she’s gone, finds a gleam of gold in the spare-change tin on the counter.

The post office is two doors down. The bored postal clerk is one of the many who only cares that Elisa doesn’t talk because it makes his day more difficult. They’re both huffy by the time Elisa manages to get the taffy box and postcard wrapped together in brown paper. She writes in her old address, but with Giles’s name and apartment number. Oh, that’s strange. She watches as the box is stamped and chucked into a canvas sack, marked OUT OF STATE.

It’s gone. Done.

She feels a little sick. Elisa’s not sure if it’s from the goodbye she’s just sent or from eating most of a box of saltwater taffy, then a piece of pie. She can’t waste candy, not after the orphanage years. Zelda had always scolded her about her sweet tooth. Giles had been just as bad as she was about pie for breakfast or ice cream for dinner. She decides to walk a little, on the sandy sidewalks, to settle herself. Her feet have toughened enough that she goes easily.

The main strip of the village is along the waterfront. Strung out along a curving mile, it has fishing boat docks near the mangroves. There’s a long strip of beach, grey with wetland silt but with a few families camping or swimming. The end Elisa’s at has the shops, a movie theater, a boardwalk pier out into the water, with a restaurant at its end.

Inevitably, the movie theater sucks her in. She’s pleased to see it doesn’t have a WHITES ONLY sign. This whole village seems to be what Zelda would’ve called ‘mixed’. Back at the lunch counter, she and Zelda could’ve had that pie together. Elisa’s fingers slip into a pocket on her diver’s belt. There are still coins there. Maybe one final movie...she doesn’t really have time…still curious, she steps up to see what second-run feature is playing.

Elisa takes in the poster. Immediately, she sees what the lady at the lunch counter had meant.

THE FIRST JAMES BOND FILM! DR. NO. The poster has girls in bathing suits on it, sure enough. One is in a two-piece suit with a belt, very like the one she stole and wears. But Elisa steps back, chilled. The poster’s main figure is a man with a gun, with the same dark hair and dark suit as someone she’s nearly forgotten: Strickland. A smaller poster had the man alone. AGENT 007. LICENSED TO KILL.

Elisa shakes her head. She doesn't know who Dr. No is, but she's on his side already, remembering another friend who'd helped them, the doctor who'd said yes. He is probably the best off of any of her friends left behind. With a last appreciative thought for him, she leaves the village street for to the strip of beach, walking as lightly as she came.

In the Florida autumn, the day’s warmth is fading fast. Elisa takes a few minutes to perch on a bench. She watches, as she always has. Watches rustling palm trees, cars passing on the beach road, families going home from the sand. She brushes away a few tears that slip out from under the sunglasses.

This had been her world. It hadn’t been all bad. It was hard to leave it, especially after a good day like today. She’s done so much more than she ever dreamed she could. But for all that, there were the newspaper headlines, speaking of hatred and war. The posters idolizing a man like Strickland. The families that had never included her.

One of those families goes by with a transistor radio, brushing her with some music. She looks twice. The family’s father, balding, reminds her of Giles. He’s trailing behind, letting his teenagers lope on ahead. The music brings back the time she’d watched a starlet on the television while Giles said: _One day she just couldn’t take the bullshit anymore and she just…walked away from everything…_

The memory calms her. She even smiles a little, for herself, for Giles. She’s glad her first words to him in the postcard were that he was right.

She is ready.

She turns towards the ocean. The beach is empty, now. Its waves, gentled by the nearby swamp, ripple evenly in the starting dusk.

Elisa undoes the silk scarf from her throat, folds it. She removes the sunglasses, puts them on top of the scarf.

Her eyes have no whites anymore.

She walks away, over the prickling grass, through the dunes and their shore-plants, their sea-wrack and shells, out into the darkening blue water.

Elisa submerges. With her head below water, she opens her changed eyes. Her throat opens, too, her gills flaring wide. She dives.

* * *

Nothing lingers in these waters. Yet in the creature’s day of waiting here, so much has passed by.

Following this long, straight coast, he and his mate had come to this little refuge: a place of weed and pillars, shaded, somehow, from above. He drifts among the pillars. Their width and greenery let him hide easily. His sensorium is pleasantly occupied. Just enough sun dapples down to warm him. The local life flits and flounders by, something to see. The more lively specimens brush him with a magnetic sense of life and energy. His skin enjoys the endless caress of the silt-enriched water. Sounds refract through the sea: booms, gloops, and chirps, an amusing symphony. His sense of taste is occupied the most. He is stripping the last flesh from a snapper.

It is still a relief to snare living food, feel the final flare of its life before tasting new blood. Good to rest, for a time, after the season of disruption he has endured. 

Earlier, he had helped himself to a few shellfish from the pillars, then stopped. The small creatures carried the taint of these waters, petroleum and other wrongness. He tastes that, by taking that taint in, they make the water around them purer. There is no mind to them worth naming. But they snap and feed and mate, driven by instinct to feel the joy of life. Like him.

He knows, more keenly than before, that a creature who does not feel that joy is wrong. That they should be destroyed, before they destroy others. If he had destroyed the two-legged one who had lured and captured him, he would have been spared the irrational torments he had endured, in that sunless, geometric series of caves upon caves. But he would never have gained what he found, there.

His sensorium has been expanded by what he has survived. He is aware, now, of time. He remembers the different eras in his long life more clearly. He lived through uncounted millennia of changes in his home: it was a river, a sea, an inland sea, a river once more. The stars above shifted. Animals changed constantly, sometimes huge, sometimes tiny. All those shifts, like this place, were well within his resilience. Being torn entirely from his waters, any waters, pained again and again, had taxed him to his limit. The isolation and boredom had made him turn from the present, anticipating the future with fear for the first time. It had been astonishing that, at his weakest and lowest, he should meet a being who reached out to him like no other.

Elisa.

Such a surprising creature, so like and yet unlike him. Two-legged, like him, yet with the soft flesh and deep knowing of the cephalopods. At home in the sharp complexities of his captors, yet bringing him offerings like the River People. Watching her in the bad cave had revived him: she was sometimes funny, sometimes alluring, always fascinating. He sensed her emotions, and she, unique of all the beings of all the millenia, sensed his, too. She had seen his pain and reached out to him. The soft brushes of her touch had stunned him then and later.

He had seen her power at last when she came to free him from the vile metal vines that held him.  One of his white-coated tormentors had followed her. But when Elisa protected him from that threatening presence with her own body, the white-coat had submitted. That one showed it by giving Elisa an offering, the twisted metal that she had used to free him. The tribute showed the white-coat had some goodness about him. For, clearly, Elisa was the spirit of what little life there was in that place.

Now, they are back in his world. His trust in her, grown from what they have endured, is unbroken. She will return; they will go; his world will become hers, too.

The two-legs’ devices have fallen quiet. The sea is still enough that he hears a call. He is curious. The call is long, deep, sonorous. Old memories rise from his bones.

The call, repeating, sends him out from his refuge. He slides past a reef, into the deeper water. He calls in response. There is an answer! It is not one he understands – yet.  He knows, now, that understanding can come.

He does not need a third call. He sees the source. A great, bowed head, a blue-black body as long as eight of him, two wide flippers opening in welcome. When he draws close, she shows that she is more. For when she turns one eye, small in her mighty head, to him, that eye lights up, briefly, just as his skin does.

The creature spins in excitement. He sparks his luminance in return, a different kind of call, and spirals close.

They hover and turn around each other in a cautious dance. The whale-shaped being parts her mouth and exhales, surrounding him in warmed water and a sense of what she is. A great cold-water spirit. Intrinsically female, like Elisa. She has not had as much time in the waters as he has, but her shape is that of a whale from an eon past. Like him, she has progressed into happy agelessness, shifting between coursing the world and her own pull to those shaped like her. She bows her great head to him, venting a second time. 

Below her, sharks are circling. For one great flipper traces blood through the water.

He lights up again and draws close, beside her eye. He holds out a hand, utters a questing yawp. It is for her to close the gap between them; and she does.

When he feels the brush of her porous skin, her great calm warmth, he slides to the blood-source. A hook has snared her. The hook is nothing to her mass, but it is tied to a line that wraps around, sawing into her for fine agony. After manipulating the intricacies of Elisa’s lost cave, and her warnings as they swam together, he can unwind it, cast it free. Then he strokes his hands over the skin and blubber, sleeking his slime into the cuts. The whale-being utters a sonorous croon, appreciative. In that instant, with whale blood on his hands, her gift touches him, too. This wanderer’s cold-water memories sluice through him. Her life on the sea’s hidden pathways, the currents that cut through the hot equatorial zones.

His way home.

After this new knowing sinks into his bones, the creature returns to the whale-being’s eye. Her eye winks amongst its dark wrinkles, flashes silver again. She makes an absurd, playful double squeak. He repeats the sound. They race side by side for a measure, until a cold current touches them. Her whole being arcs in joy at the cool caress. He yawps and diverges, turns back to his one mate. She goes on to her many mates. Soon, the whale-being is gone from his senses. His bones tell him they will never meet again.

Curiosity still has him. He turns outwards, away from the shore, and tries to sense the great deep. There is nothing to see but blue velvet shading into darkness. He calls into it anyway.

Perhaps the mighty meeting that just ended, its shared power, sent a spark of blue or silver into that abyss. For at his call, he senses something…else.

It is not heard, but felt. It touches the shadows of his mind, at the base of his skull. It is greater than himself or the whale-being, vaster and slower. A power that had slept until this rousing.

Its touch brings a sense of profound abyss, darkest darkness, coldest cold: a space where the blackest ocean depth differs little from the furthest void of the stars. Of epochs untold that make his lifespan but a cephalopod’s brief squirm. Its attention is the briefest moment’s stab of black and white, the painful flare of a distant star, the wink of an unfathomable eye, a shadowy coiled stroke of…approval.

Then, mercifully, it is gone.

Frigid knowing takes his bones. When the stars are strange enough for that presence to awake at last, this world's long journey will be fulfilled.

The creature rockets back through the reef. His skin yearns for sunlight, his gills crave the richness of estuarine water, his being aches for his sweet and solitary mate. The shallows, restored around him, are a gleaming paradise. Even the floating shells Elisa signs as _boats_ are welcome to him.

He swoops back to the place where he and Elisa had parted. He has known friends and enemies and Elisa: for all that he yearns for home, he will never have peace again without her. His thoughts flow and chatter, trying to shape the signs and signals to share this experience with her. He does not know, yet, how far this drive will take him, that it will bring them even closer.

For now, he measures the light. Its angles are changing. They will be reunited soon. For Elisa has always returned to him before. She will always return to him in the future.

A young barracuda, exploring between the pillars, feints at him. He takes it easily. He devours it thoroughly, respectfully, with the approval that abyssal being had given him.

* * *

 Fifteen feet down, the water both weighs Elisa and makes her feel weightless. She swims between a roof of blue light, a floor of rippled green sand. Though she’s gone down, she feels uplifted under the water. Endlessly embraced. Like this whole blue world is, somehow, on their side.  

Beautiful creatures float or shimmer by. They don’t hurt her, usually. If they do, she doesn’t blame them. She knows where to find healing. Over the journey, she’s had to ask for that so much. She’s swimming well now, after her day on land, but she still tires quickly. It’s time for some changes.

A small octopus zooms past Elisa, hovering eye to eye with her. It’s so clever and ancient-looking.  Elisa lifts her wrist, waves hello. For an instant it shocks her by twining its tentacles around her arm, going inky black where it clasps her.  She’s so astonished she releases some air from her lungs, a tribute of silver bubbles. The octopus blinks in seeming pleasure. Its whole being tightens as it goes tawny again, shoots away.

There’s shadows above, a few boats, a swimmers’ platform. There’s shadows ahead, the underside of the pier, its tall pillars rippling with green sea life. Elisa’s heart beats faster as she heads for the most sheltered spot amidst those pillars. He will be there. He must be, after all they have gone through together.

The creature sees Elisa, he knows, before she sees him. For she gleams brighter than the silver barracuda did in the depths, her pale form banded with the straps of white skin. The sense of counting time drops away as she nears. When she is by his side, he is entirely absorbed in every instant with her. She has swapped her grace on land for swooping and bobbing like a newborn dolphin. But she is happy, and the energy of it flickers around her, an aura of beauty and pleasure. He trills to her, clear and reverberating, and slips out from behind a pillar. She sees him with an adorable start, dips and rises, and comes to him.

Elisa smiles into the deep. There he is: her love. Under water, the creature is, to her, perfection, a dream of beauty made real. He is magnificent in his element, swaying serenely, floating exactly where he wants to be. They have an ecstatic reunion between the green pillars, embracing like she’d been gone for years. When she can bear to, Elisa shifts back.

Treading her feet to stay in place, she lifts her empty hands and signs, _All is good. Things gone. I am here now. Together. Always._ She wants to tell him more, all about her day, the food, trying to help Giles and Zelda. Inside herself, she resolves to keep teaching him more, during the times when they rest.

They are below the restaurant on the pier. Suddenly, the darkening water around them blinks back into day. The restaurant has turned on its lights. Their hideaway now shimmers with beams and zones of brightness. The creature purrs, reminded of the lights of his varied homes, the moon and sun glimmering down between forest leaves and kelp towers. Elisa smiles, thinking of how the cinema’s light used to shine up through her floor, giving her something to dance across.

They both start at another pleasant surprise. The restaurant has started up its sound system, too. The scratch of a record pierces the water, followed by the notes of a violin, wavering sweetly.

He signs, _Music!_

Elisa signs, _For you._

He replies: _Us._

Elisa draws near him in response, pulls his hand to her waist. He clasps her there. With her hands free, she reaches above, the below, her diver’s belt, removing the white bikini. She lets it drift away.

Together, they dance in the water. _Strangers in the Night_ warbles down to them, and _Our Love Is Here To Stay,_ and _Can't Take That Away From Me_. They rise and dip, swirl and turn. They spin faster for different songs, ones with lively rhythms, _Boom Chica Chica_ and _Mucha Muchacha_. And – Elisa recognizes a particular song, the first one she'd played for the creature in the lab. It is transformed as it pulses through the water. Elisa realizes this is how the song has sounded to him, underwater, all along.

Elisa spins to face him. She draws his great hand to rest over her heart, looks into his eyes. She touches her gills, then gestures over her entire body. She signs. _More, please._

To him, her desire is as immediate and piercing as the music. He draws her close. They bow their foreheads together. She trembles to drink in his singular and gentle kiss, his take on this strange human practice. Despite its softness, in her urgent response, she nicks her lip on one of his edged teeth. There is blood between them. He seals his mouth over it.

At that, the change begins.

Elisa feels a surge of sugar-rush in her veins, her last human meal racing through her with a new purpose. Indefinable rearrangements take place inside her torso. She parts her lips, adjusting to altered teeth, a bit thicker inside her mouth. She shivers all over, her skin tightening for an instant. Her scalp twitches as her hair, too, thickens, strengthens against the deep. Last of all, her fingers web, just a touch; her toes shift and change.

It is done. He spins her into a final dancer’s turn, centering her in the alley of pillars below the pier. The beams of light from above play over this changed Elisa.

Elisa spirals in the water, holds out her arms. Much of her skin shimmers with a fine casing of scales. The back of her arms is softest pewter with some stripes; the underside shimmers silver. She strokes her breasts and stomach, gone silvery as well, with a hint of rose. She is wearing a sequined dancing gown forever. Like a ballerina, she points and admires her hands, new mermaid’s feet, nails like chips of pearl-shell. Deep eyes soft, she signs. _Thank you._ And extends an arm to her mate, just as the music swells anew.

He swirls about her, parting from her to dive and rise, to admire her from every angle. His ecstasy is complete. Elisa is with him, now, her body strengthened for his world to match the life within her. He’d thought of the barracuda’s slim ruthlessness as her skin silvered, her back darkened with camouflage. She still has her troubling octopus fingers, so soft and clever, able to undo him utterly. Her narrow face, always brimming with expression, remains hers, as well. The irises of her eyes, widened and flexible now, were always the dark green-amber of his waiting river. Of home. The creature dives below her for a glimpse of her bewitching erotic zones. The curious patch of fur between her legs is sleek, a swatch of an otter’s pelt.  He rises before her. Her skin’s shifts have darkened her small nipples. They stand out enticingly. Drawn as never before, he strokes them as he rises past her.

Startled, she lights up for the first time.

Elisa realizes that one thing about her is unchanged: even in surprise and delight, she is near-silent. It has never occurred to him that her quiet is something amiss, to be repaired. It is simply her. She embraces this, blinking with emotion. With him, it does not matter any more.

He is hovering just above her, uttering brisk yawps of pleasure. Elisa reaches out and nabs his ankles. Naughtily, she pulls down. He lets himself be caught, or perhaps he’s the one who draws her up. They entwine once more in their loving embrace, aspin in the water.

The creature caresses every inch of Elisa’s changed form, her tiny skin-lights starring to life at his touch. She returns his touches, fingers sleeking over his own phosphoresence and his thin integument of slime, always renewing here. Clinging to each other like a paired constellation, their shared weight drifts slowly down until he stands in the seagrass. Elisa lets him go and starts to rise: she is more buoyant. Before she drifts, she wraps her legs around his waist.

He fairly vibrates as Elisa twines around him. For all that they are closer, her differences still enthral him. Her touch is the embrace of a divine hydra, coiling around him with her limbs, devouring him with her mouth. She caresses him like before, pleasure that he leans into. The tiny scrapes of her new nails are sweet, small pains. And the span between her legs, as she opens them to slide against him, is as hot and tender as ever. She’s freed him to entwine him again and he’s glad.

Elisa can’t stop smiling through her kisses. It’s lovely to be more beautiful for him. Simply embracing him like this, she can feel that she’s stronger. Her new shimmer only reduces her sensations where it goes pewter. Pressed to his front-plates, he’s as cool and slippery and wild as when she first dared to go to him. Now they have a whole world to love in, together. She lowers her legs’ clasp so that their hips press together, just so. When his shaft slips free, she combines the water’s lift and her arms’ ease to raise, then takes him inside her. His body arcs towards her automatically, as it did the first time she shared this. Instinct and knowledge, past and future, are all obliterated for him in this perfect now.

His deep moan makes Elisa's whole being vibrate with delight. The slippery fluid his member sheds has a new purpose in the deep: when he penetrates her, their joining swiftly seals against the water. Elisa wriggles. She is, in important places, less irritated by the salt sea. His own strength amazes, supporting Elisa in the arc of his arms. She tightens her legs around him for a different, older dance. Linked to him, close as she can be, she is blazing, shivering, hungry, satisfied, so alive with love. Together, they surge to a shared climax. It ripples deep through them both.

They cling to the joy of it, slow to disengage. After a time, Elisa slides free, but not far. The music is still playing. Elisa swims up. He follows. They renew their dance, more languidly, resting in movement. Below the surface, Elisa finally finds a certain balance, air in her lungs, feet paddling softly, to let herself float in place as gracefully he does.

He draws beside her again. Dappled by the bars of light, they spiral at arm’s length, then draw close once more. Hanging there together, suspended in luminous bliss, they embrace.

A record scratches once more. The music stops, overhead: the lights go down.  At Elisa’s urging, the two lovers let themselves sink down, darkened to be discreet before everyone leaves.

When all is still overhead, he signs to her: _Go._

Elisa nods. _Yes, go._

He kicks himself off the bottom, a powerful arc, silt clouds blooming in his wake. Elisa crouches a little, then kicks up, too. For all that she’s left behind, she lets her diver's belt stay, for now. When they reached their destination, the home the creature’s nature draws him to, maybe she wouldn’t need it, and its knife.  Or maybe she would. The little she knows, and her skeptical wariness, has helped them get this far.

They were going to – he only said _the heart_. Elisa thought she knew what he meant: the Amazon river. The heart of his world. Soon, they’d be at the hard part, the great crossing. She hoped she was strong enough, now, to do it. But when that was done, he’d told, there’d be many, many homes to choose from. She believes him.

For now, he holds his arms open to her, invites her to rest against his inexhaustible urge to swim. Elisa wraps herself around him, twining like the octopus. She feels him flex his muscles, gills expanding. As he breathes, she kisses him, long and deep, and releases him. She opens her arms so that she mirrors him in the water. Ready to try and keep up.

He understands. His lights flash, his water-voice bells out.

United, they swim for the beckoning depths. 

**Author's Note:**

> Some notes:
> 
> The first James Bond movie, Dr. No, released in 1962, and [its poster!](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2525590/Licensed-make-killing-Bond-poster-worth-5-000-Original-1962-film-Dr-No-selection-rare-memorabilia-going-hammer.html) I pictured Elisa, in a white bathing suit, doing the reverse of Dr. No’s iconic Bond-girl-emerging-from-the-sea. Having her return to the sea to her gill-man’s arms, to recline there like the girl in _Creature from the Black Lagoon._ Then, the poster, and me comparing Bond's _Dr. No_ costume shots to Strickland’s costume shots from TSOW. Strickland and Bond’s base outfits are nearly identical, including their glimpse of leisure wear. Maybe it's the rigid style of the time, or maybe del Toro and crew have opinions about Bond. In case you were wondering, Strickland’s not wearing a military uniform in TSOW because he’s not on a military base. 
> 
> In a world with enough magic for a river god…perhaps there are other gods. Other life-elementals, brought about by overlaps of geological harmony and evolutionary explosions in diversity. (Sample moments: the Cambrian, the Devonian, the Neogene – the great age of mammalian megafauna). Ones that have risen and fallen, that endure unperceived, that faded or were destroyed by humans. And what about other magics and beings from other worlds, like the eldritch horrors depicted by Lovecraft and beloved of del Toro? 
> 
> Elisa’s transformation builds on what we’ve seen of the creature’s healing/changing powers – he both undoes hurts and fulfils physical-shape desires.
> 
> Finally, have [a classic key lime pie recipe.](https://www.saveur.com/article/Recipes/Key-Lime-Pie-1010%20) After the key lime pie love in this story I’ll be making one at my place. (Giles voice) I get pie!


End file.
